I am a great fan of the Gutenberg project, a noteworthy and honorable effort to digitize copyright-free texts. This project has released into the public domain over 20,000 classic books.

This article will explain how to integrate this huge body of material with the Ubuntu desktop.

The Gutenberg project releases books in a standard text format. Volunteers convert a subset of the text to HTML and PDFs and to a few other less ubiquitous formats besides. Other support sites such as manybooks.net give you even more choice of formats including compressed formats for palmtops, iPod and Java-based telephones. These sites are mostly free with the option to make a small donation.

The Gutenberg project has delivered to the world the base material for serious and progressive Edutainment. Started back in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, the project has blossomed with numerous affiliated projects. The project’s great success is measurable with a body of around 100,000 available texts—and rising.

The Gutenberg project has delivered to the world the base material for serious and progressive Edutainment.

Can software help bring to life plain text files? Alternatively, are we doomed to wander the world carrying sheets of paper and waiting for the next advance in smart reader technology and potential commercial vendor lock-in?

I will discuss the installation and merits of the following packages:

• guternbrowser
• gmountiso
• espeak
• recite
• serpentine

By the finish you will be able to browse e-text and/or hear the text spoken. I will also explain how to download and mount Gutenberg CDs (with collections of books).

Installing the e-text browsing packages

With so many packages available in the GNU/Linux universe, it makes sense to search for a pre-compiled binary rather than installing from a downloaded tar file. I personally find it natural to run apt from the command line; for example typing:

sudo apt-cache search guten.

To my surprise, my search only returned two entries: PYGE[13] (an unrelated python based series of related file manipulation applications) and gutenbrowser. Gutenbrowser sounded promising, running:

apt-cache show gutenbrowser

You can see that the package is an e-text reader supported by Ubuntu, falling under the general section universe/text. To install the software, input:

sudo apt-get install gutenbrowser

Test the newly-installed software by typing gutenbrowser. An e-reader will pop-up, as shown in figure 1

Figure 1: The gutenbrowser under fire.

The gutenbrowser contains basic functionality to search and download text from a central repository, make bookmarks and display the text in any font size that you choose. After reading a few of the smaller books, I concluded that the browser was a solid application for the desktop.

To make a shortcut, right click your mouse on the desktop and select the “create launcher” option. A dialog will then appear asking for extra information for name, command, and comment. Simply fill in Gutenbrowser for the name, gutenbrowser for the command and an optional comment.

To download an e-text and read it, you will first need to visit the menu item Library → Gutenberg. At this point, a dialog will appear with a list of authors and titles. Double clicking on a book title triggers the E-reader to download the book to the selected directory on your local drive. To import the downloaded file into the main menu select “file open local library” and import the text you have just downloaded. The e-reader will then display the title of the book with any other imported books titles available. Selecting the title and double clicking loads the book’s text.

You should now be able to read imported books in Gutenberg text format. However, what if you are a road warrior and prefer to keep a large local library? Disk space is cheap: take advantage of ever improving economics, download an ISO image from a Gutenberg site, and mount the image locally, thus allowing you to read all the thousands of books contained in it.

Local storage

After using the e-text reader for a couple of days I realized that downloading texts was inconsistent: everything worked most of the time, but sometimes downloading the books took a little time and occasionally the relevant file was missing. I therefore decided to download an ISO image the “Best Of CD August 2003” as mentioned on the Gutenberg website. I then tried to mount the image to my file system. The advantage of this approach is that I did not need to burn a CD/DVD and then copy the files over to my hard drive. Downloading the ISO is potentially helpful for schools that have limited internet access for their local network of machines. Please be a good net citizen: if you download an image choose the nearest mirror site instead of risking surge loading the main site.

A compact Ubuntu-related helper to mount ISO images is Gmount-iso. To install it, just type from the command line:

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

A compact Ubuntu related tool to mount ISO images is Gmount-iso

On installation, a new menu option appears on the Gnome desktop under Applications → System Tools → Gmount-iso (figure 2). To mount the image you will first need to create a directory. For this example, I made a temporary one under my home directory /home/alan/temp/gunten. To mount, simply locate the image file from Nautilus and then the mount point, in this case /home/alan/temp/gunten and finally click the button with the word “mount” on it.

The main dialog from Gmount-iso

Performing the same action from the command line every time means remembering the exact syntax of the mount command, which can be a hassle. However, for the sake of completeness the equivalent commands to the actions just mentioned is:

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 /home/alan/Desktop/PG2003-08.ISO /home/alan/temp/guten/

The Gutenbrowser e-reader is fast and reads the text files found under the /etext series of directories on the newly mounted ISO without any hesitation.